“Great
pain urges all animals, and has urged them during endless generations, to make
the most violent and diversified efforts to escape from the cause of suffering.
Even when a limb or other separate part of the body is hurt, we often see a
tendency to shake it, as if to shake off the cause, though this may obviously
be impossible.” —Charles Darwin[i]

What
happens when you stub your toe? You’ve scarcely felt the impact yet, but you
catch your breath and start to sweat—because you know what’s coming next: a
dreadful ache will tear at your gut and all other goals will be brushed away,
replaced by your wish to escape from that pain.

Why
does the sensation called pain sometimes lead to what we call suffering? How could such a simple event
distort all your other thoughts so much? This chapter proposes a theory of
this: if a pain is intense and persistent enough, it will stir up a certain set
of resources, and then these, in turn, arouse some more.
Then, if this process continues to grow, your mind becomes a victim of the kind
of spreading, large-scale “cascade” that overcomes the rest of the mind, as we
depicted in §1-7:

Now,
sometimes a pain is just a pain; if it’s not too intense or doesn’t last long,
then it may not bother you much. And even if it hurts a lot, you can usually
muzzle a pain for a time, by trying to think about something else. And
sometimes you can make it hurt less by thinking about the pain itself; you can
focus your attention on it, evaluate its intensity, and try to regard its
qualities as interesting novelties.

Daniel Dennett: “If you can make yourself study
your pains (even quite intense pains) you will find, as it were, no room left
to mind them: (they stop hurting). However studying a pain (e.g., a headache)
gets boring pretty fast, and as soon as you stop studying them, they come back
and hurt, which, oddly enough, is sometimes less boring than being bored by
them and so, to some degree, preferable."

But
this only provides a brief
reprieve, because until your pain goes away, it may continue to gripe and
complain, much like a nagging frustrated child; you can think about something else for a time, but no
matter what kinds of diversion you try, soon that pain will regain its control
of your mind.

Still,
we should be thankful that pain evolved, because it protects our bodies from
harm. First, as Darwin suggests above, this may induce you to shake off the
cause of the pain—and it also may keep you from moving the injured part, which
may help it to rest and repair itself. However, consider these higher-level
ways through which pain may protect us from injury.

Pain focuses your attention on the particular
body-parts involved.
It makes it hard to think about anything else.
Pain makes you tend to move away from whatever is causing the stimulus.
It makes you want that state to end, and it makes you learn, for future times,
not to repeat the same mistake.

Yet
instead of being grateful for pain, people always complaining about it. "Why
are we cursed," pain’s victims ask, "with such unpleasant experiences?" We often think of
pleasure and pain as opposites—yet they share many similar qualities:

Pleasure makes you focus on the particular
body-parts involved.
It makes it hard to think about anything else.
It impels you to draw closer to whatever is causing the stimulus.
It makes you want to maintain that state, while teaching you, for future times,
to keep repeating the same mistake.

This
suggests that both pleasure and pain could engage some of the same kinds of
machinery. For example, they both tend to narrow one’s range of attention,
they both have connections with how we learn, and they both assign high priority to just one of a
person’s many goals. In
view of those similarities, a visiting alien intelligence might wonder why
people like pleasure so much—yet display so little desire for pain.

Alien: Why do you humans complain about pain?
Person: We don’t like pain because it hurts.
Alien: Then explain to me just what ‘hurting’ is
Person: Hurting is simply the way pain feels.
Alien: Then please tell me what a ‘feeling’ is.

At this
point the conversation may stop, because quite a few human thinkers might claim
that we’ll never have ways to explain such things, because feelings
are ‘irreducible.’

Dualist
Philosopher:
Science can only explain a thing in terms of other, yet simpler things. But
subjective feelings like pleasure or pain are, by their nature, indivisible.
They can’t be reduced to smaller parts; like atoms, they simply are or are not.

This
book will take the contrary view that feelings are not simple at all; instead
they are extremely complex. And paradoxically, once we recognize this
complexity, this can show us ways to explain why pleasure and pain might seem
similar if (as we’ll try to show in Chapter §9) we can represent both of them
as results that come from similar kinds of machinery. [Also, see §§Dignity of
Complexity.]

People often use hurting, pain
and suffering as though those
conditions were almost the same, and differ mainly in degree. This chapter will argue that we
need much better distinctions and theories for these.

Our
idea about how Suffering works is that any severe and prolonged pain leads to a
cascade of mental change that disrupts your other plans and goals. By thus
suppressing most other resources, this narrows your former interests—so that
most of your mind now focuses on one insistent and overwhelming command: No
matter what else, get rid of that Pain.

This
machinery has great value indeed—if it can make you remove whatever’s
disturbing you, so that you get back to what you were trying to do. However,
if that pain remains intense after you’ve done all you can to relieve it, then it may
continue to keep the resources that it has seized—and further to proceed to
capture yet more—so that you can scarcely keep anything else ‘on your mind’.
If left to itself, that spreading might cease—but so long as the pain refuses
to leave, that cascade of disruption may continue to grow, and as those other
resources get taken away, your efforts to think will deteriorate, and what
remains of the rest of your mind may feel like it’s being sucked into that
black hole of suffering.

Now,
goals that seemed easy in normal times get increasingly harder to achieve.
Whatever else you try to do, pain interrupts with its own demands and keeps
frustrating your other plans until you can barely think about anything but the
pain and the trouble it’s caused. Perhaps the torment of
suffering comes largely from depriving you of your freedom to choose what to
think about. Suffering imprisons you.

Neurologist: These ideas about disruptive cascades
are suggestive, but have you any evidence that processes like these exist? How
could you show that these guesses are right?

It
would be hard to demonstrate this today, but when scanners show more of what
happens in brains, we should be able to see those cascades. In the
meantime, though, one scarcely needs more evidence than one sees in the
diversity of the complaints from the victims of suffering:

Frustration at not achieving goals.
Annoyance at losing mobility.
Vexation at not being able to think.
Dread of becoming disabled and helpless.
Shame of becoming a burden to friends.
Remorse at dishonoring obligations.
Dismay about the prospect of failure.
Chagrin at being considered abnormal.
Resenting the loss of opportunities.
Fears about future survival and death.

This
suggests that we learn to use words like ‘suffering’, 'anguish', and 'torment'
to try to describe what happens when those disruption cascades continue: as
each new system becomes distressed and starts to transmit disturbing requests,
your normal thoughts get overcome, until most of your mind has been stolen from
you.

Citizen: I agree that these all can come with
suffering. But that doesn’t explain what suffering is. To be sure,
resentment, remorse, dismay, and fear are all involved with reactions to
pain—and can help to cause us to suffer. But why can’t we just regard
‘suffering’ as just one more kind of sensation?

When we
talk about ‘sensations’ we usually mean the signals that come from sensors that
are excited by conditions in the external world. However here, I think, we’re
talking about signals that come, not from outside, but from special resources
that detect high-level conditions inside the brain. Later, in section §4-3,
we’ll suggest how such resources might actually work.

In any
case, when suffering, it is hard to think in your usual ways. Now, torn away
from your regular thoughts, you can scarcely reflect on anything else than on your
present state of impairment—and awareness of your dismal condition only tends
to make things worse. Pain, as we said, deprives you of freedom, and a major
component of suffering is the frustration that accompanies the loss of your
freedom of mental choice.

Of
course the same is true, to a smaller degree, in our more usual states of mind:
our thoughts are always constrained by the goals that we hold, which try to
engage different processes. Those processes sometimes cooperate, but they also
frequently clash and conflict. We never have enough time to do all the things
that we want to do—and so every new goal or idea that we get may make us
abandon, or put aside, some other ambitions we want to achieve.

Most
times, we don’t mind those conflicts much, because we feel that we’re still in
control, and free to make our own decisions—and if we do not like the result,
we’re still ‘free’ to go back and try something else. But when an aching pain
intrudes, those projects and plans get thrust aside, as though by an external
force[ii] —and
then we end up with more desperate schemes for finding ways to escape from the
pain. Pain’s urgency is useful to us when we need to deal with emergencies—but
if it cannot be soon relieved, it then can become a catastrophe.

Indeed,
suffering can affect you so much that your friends may see you being replaced
by a different personality. It may even make you so regress that you cry out
and beg for help, as though you've become an infant again. Of course, you may
see yourself as still the same, and imagine that you still possess your old
memories and abilities. But you won’t be able to use those well until you
switch back to your regular Self.

“The restless, busy nature of the world, this, I
declare, is at the root of pain. Attain that composure of mind, which is
resting in the peace of immortality. Self is but a heap of composite qualities,
and its world is empty like a fantasy.” —Buddha

“Life
is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too
soon.” – Woody Allen

Yesterday
Joan tripped on a step. She didn't suspect that she’d injured herself—but
today she has just become aware of a terrible pain in her knee. She's been
working on an important report and tomorrow she plans to deliver it. “But if
this keeps up,” she hears herself think, “I won't be able to take that trip.” She tries to make herself get
back to work, but shortly she drops her pen and moans, “I really must get
rid of this pain.” She attempts to visit her medicine shelf, to find a
pill that could bring some help, but a stab of pain makes her sit back down,
and instructs her not to use that leg. She clutches her knee, catches her
breath, and tries to think about what to do next—but the pain so overwhelms her
mind that she can't seem to focus on anything else.

How
does Joan know where her pain is located? That’s easy to do for each place on
her skin—because she is born with ‘maps’ of her skin in various different parts
of her brain, like this one in the sensory cortex.

www.sm.luth.se/.../ Sensory%20homunculus.png

Many
textbooks about the brain explain that those maps help us to determine the
locations of tactile sensations—but those books don’t ask what advantage we gain
from having those maps—considering that the skin itself could serve for that.
(We’ll discuss this in TopoQualia.) However, we are not nearly so
good at locating the causes of interior pains. It seems that our brains
do not come equipped to represent the locations of structures inside our skins. Presumably, good
maps for these have never evolved because they would not have been of much use
to us: before the era of medicine, there was no way to protect one’s spleen,
except to guard one’s whole abdomen—hence all one actually needed to know is
when one had a bellyache. In particular, one never says, "I feel a
terrible pain in my brain,” because we never had any remedies for injuries to the brain
itself—so we never evolved any sense of pain in our brains, or of the spatial
locations of mental events.

In any
case, for Joan's pain to be useful to her, it must make her focus her thoughts
on that knee—while also postponing her other goals. “Get rid of Me,” Joan’s pain demands, “and
get back into your Normal State.” She won’t be able to work on her report until she can
satisfy that imperative.

How
does our sense of pain actually work? Our scientists know quite a lot about
the very first few events that result when a part of your body is traumatized.
First, the injured cells release chemicals that cause a special type of nerve
to send signals to your spinal cord. Then certain neural networks send other
signals up to your brain. However, our scientists understand much less of what
happens, then, in the rest of the brain. In particular, I’ve never seen any
good high-level theories of how or why pain leads to suffering. Instead we
find mainly descriptions like this:

The sense of pain originates when special nerves
react to high temperature, pressure, etc. Then their signals rise up to your thalamus, which sends them to other parts of
your brain—in ways that on various ways involve hormones,
endorphins, and neurotransmitters. Eventually, when some of those signals reach your limbic system, this
results in such emotions such as sadness, anger, and frustration.

However,
that doesn’t explain what suffering is—because it isn’t enough only to know
which parts of the brain are involved with pain. We must also know what those
parts do and how each affects the other ones, both when we’re in our most usual
states and (to make sense of suffering) when we’re subject to larger cascades.
Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall, who pioneered theories of how pain works,
cautiously note that:

“An area within the functionally complex anterior
cingulate cortex has a highly selective role in pain processing, consistent
with an involvement in the characteristic emotional/motivational component
(unpleasantness and urgency) of pain."[iii]

But we
also know that that pain is involved with many other parts of the brain.[iv] Thus Melzack and Wall go on to say,

"The concept [of a pain
center] is pure fiction unless virtually the whole brain is considered to be
the ‘pain center’ because the thalamus, the limbic system, the hypothalamus,
the brain stem reticular formation, the parietal cortex, and the frontal cortex
are all implicated in pain perception."

Furthermore,
our reactions to pain depend on other mental conditions:

Daniel Dennett: “Real pain is
bound up with the struggle to survive, with the real prospect of death, with
the afflictions of our soft and fragile and warm flesh. ... There can be no
denying (though many have ignored it) that our concept of pain is inextricably
bound up with (which may mean something less strong than essentially connected
with) our ethical intuitions, our senses of suffering, obligation, and evil.” [v]

In
general, we still do not know much about how physical pain leads to suffering.
For although we have learned a good deal about where many functions are done in the
brain, we still know very little about how each of those brain-parts actually work—because we still need theories
(like those in this book) about what those resources actually do.

Perhaps
we’ll find more clues about such things in a rare condition that results from injuring certain parts of the brain:
the victims of‘Pain
Asymbolia’ still recognize what the
rest of us describe as pain—but do not find those feelings unpleasant, and may
even laugh in response to them. Perhaps they have lost some resources that cause what, in others, are
cascades of torments.

Citizen: Physical pain is just
one kind of pain—and emotional pains can be just as intense; they can even
drive people to suicide. How could your theory also explain those other kinds
of agonies?

Are mental and physical pains
the same? They frequently seem to have similar ways to make changes in our
mental states. What kind of relation could there be between how we react to,
say, pinching or burning of the skin, and ‘painful’ events inside our minds, like,

The pain of losing a long-term
companion.
The pain of watching the pain of others.
The pain of sleep deprivation.
The pain of humiliation and perceived failure.
The pain of excessive and prolonged stress.

Suppose that you were to hear
Charles say, "I felt so anxious and upset that it felt like something
was tearing my gut.” You might
conclude that Charles’s feelings reminded him of times when he had a
stomachache.

Similarly, we often speak as
though 'hurt feelings' resemble physical pains, no matter that they originate
from such different situation-types. This could be because, although they
begin in different ways, both may end up by seizing control of the same
higher-level machinery. Thus, disrespect on the part of a friend can disrupt
your brain in much the same way as a deep, aching pain. And sometimes, what
starts with physical pain can get amplified ‘psychologically’:

Student:
As a child, I once I hit a chair with my head, and covered the area with my
hand. Although the pain was intense, I was not much disturbed. But when I
looked and saw blood on my hand, then I really panicked and started to cry.

In any case, most kinds of
feelings are hard to describe because we know so little about how their
machinery works. However, it can be easy to recognize a mental state (either in yourself or in someone
else) because you may only need to detect a few features of that particular
mental condition. And this will often be enough to help us to communicate—by
using what we call ‘empathy.’ For if two minds have enough structure in
common, then just a few clues could lead each one to recognize some of the
other’s condition.

“As he thought of it, a sharp
pang of pain struck through him like a knife and made each delicate fiber of
his nature quiver. His eyes deepened into amethyst, and across them came a mist
of tears. He felt as if a hand of ice had been laid upon his heart.” —Oscar
Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Grey.

We have
many words for types of pain—like stinging, throbbing, piercing, shooting,
gnawing, burning, aching, and so on. But words never capture quite enough of
what any particular feeling is, so we have to resort to analogies that try to
describe what each feeling is like—such as ‘a knife’ or ‘a hand of ice’—or images of a
suffering person’s appearances. Dorian Grey felt no physical pain, but was
horrified about growing old—hideous, wrinkled, and worst of all, of having his
hair lose its beautiful gold.

What
makes hurting so hard to describe? Is this because feelings are so simple and
basic that there’s nothing more to be said about them? No, it's precisely the
opposite; chapter §9 will argue that feelings are intricate processes—but
because we have so little sense of how these work, we can only describe their
effects in terms of analogies with familiar things.

"I'm
so something that I can't remember what it's called."—Miles Steele (age 5)

For
example I’ve heard suffering likened to a balloon that keeps dilating inside
your mind until there's no more room for your usual thoughts. Then you might
feel you’ve lost your ‘freedom of choice’ and that your mental condition has
become like that of a prisoner.

In any
case, this raises the question of what distinctions we’re trying to make with
like pain, discomfort, and suffering. Sometimes these seem
interchangeable, sometimes they signify different degrees, and at other times
we use them as though we're referring to different phenomena. The next few
sections will try to use different words for the kinds of mental activities
that come shortly after an injury. We’ll only use pain for what comes
first—the sensations that come from the injury. Then we’ll use hurting for what comes next—that is,
for how we describe pain’s early effects. Finally, we’ll use “suffering” for the states we get when
these escalate into large-scale cascades.

Critic: Even if your theory is right—that
sufferings are disruption-cascades—why can’t all that machinery work without
making people feel so uncomfortable?

Our theory suggests that one
cannot separate those things because when we speak about ‘feeling
uncomfortable’we are in large partreferring tothat
disruption of our other thoughts! Indeed, pain could not serve the functions
for which it evolved if our usual processes were to continue in the face of
painful stimuli—for if we kept pursuing our usual goals we might not try to
escape from those sources of pain, and just carry on with our usual thoughts
while our bodies were being torn apart. [See §§Zombie-Machines.]

Philosopher. Isn’t there
still something missing here. You have been describing various mental
conditions, and some machinery that might make them occur. But you have not
given the slightest hint of why those conditions should give rise to feelings—or that basic sense of being or
of experiencing.

Terms like ‘basic’ or ‘experience’ only
hide our lack of insight about the processes they purport to describe. For
example, when you ‘see’ your own hand, you seem to know that it is your hand without any intermediate steps—but that is because you
have so little sense of the complex systems that recognize this.

It must be the same for feelings,
too; when they seem basic or direct, this merely reflects our ignorance of how
we recognize types of mental events.

What do we mean when we talk about
feelings? What do we mean by “I feel good,” “I’m confused,” “I’m excited,” or “Now I feel that I’m making progress.” You feel pleased when
you achieve a goal—but this can be mixed with a sense of regret because now you must find something else to do. And
sometimes success makes you feel surprise—which
may lead you to ask what caused that success, or why you failed to expect it. Clearly, some such feeling must result from reflective
attempts to describe your states.

For, when you ask yourself, “How
(or What) do I feel," this invites a
description of your present condition—and of course such a question is hard to
answer because any such effort will have an effect on the system that’s trying
to make that description. Then this could make you (unknowingly) switch to
using a different view of yourself—and this would make it hard for your mind to
keep track of such changes in “real time.”

This suggests that what we call
'feelings' are attempts (by various parts of our minds) to describe large-scale
aspects of mental conditions. However, those conditions are usually so complex
that the best we can do is to recognize them, and then try to say which other
feelings they’re ‘like’. This is what make feelings hard to explain: it is not because a feeling is so basic that it’s indescribable, but
because each such conditions is so intricate that any compact description of it
can capture no more than some fragments of it. This problem will come up many
times in this book and Chapter §9 will try to summarize it.

Sonja: “To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering
one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is
to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to
love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy.
Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much
happiness.” — Woody Allen, in “Love and Death.”

Some of
pain's effects are so quick that they’re finished before you’ve had ‘time to
think’. If Joan had happened to touch something hot, she might have jerked her
arm away before she even noticed it. But when that pain came from inside
Joan’s knee, her reflexes gave no escape from it, for it followed her everywhere
she went and kept her from thinking of anything else. Persistent pain can
distract us so much as to thwart all attempts to escape from it. Then we’re
trapped in a terrible circle. When pain gets too good at its principal job—of
focusing you on your injury—you may need some way to override pain, to regain
control of the rest of your mind.

If Joan
urgently wants to cross that room, she can probably do it ‘in spite of the
pain’—at the risk of further injury—the way that runners and wrestlers do.
Professional boxers and football players are trained to take blows that may
damage their brains. Then, how do they override pain’s effects?

"About that time, G. Gordon Liddy began a new
exercise in will power. He would burn his left arm with cigarettes, then
matches and candles to train himself to overcome pain. … Years later, Liddy
assured Sherry Stevens that he would never be forced to disclose anything he
did not choose to reveal. He asked her to hold out a lit lighter. Liddy put his
hand in the flame and held it there until the smell of burning flesh caused
Stevens to pull the flame away." —Larry Taylor

We each
know tricks for doing this, and see some of these as commendable, and others as
execrable, depending on the culture we’re in.

Another way to deal with pain
is to apply a counter-irritant:
when a certain part of your body aches, it sometimes helps to rub or pinch that
spot—or to aggravate some different place. But why should a second disturbance offset the
first, instead of making you feel worse?[vi]
And why do such drugs as the opiates have such specific effects on how much we
hurt? Researchers have varied ideas about this but those theories are still
incomplete. The simplest idea is when there are multiple disturbances, it is
hard for the rest of the brain to choose one to ‘focus’ on—and (somehow) this makes it
harder for a single large cascade to grow.

Usually
when you attend to a pain, that makes the pain seem more intense—and this in
turn intensifies your goal of getting rid of it.

If you
keep your mind involved with other distracting activities, then a pain may seem
to feel less intense. We all have heard those anecdotes about wounded soldiers who continue to
fight without noticing pain—and only later succumb to shock, after the battle
is lost or won. So the goal to survive, or to save one's friends, may be able
to override everything else. On a smaller scale, with a mild pain, you can just be too busy to notice
it. Then the pain may still ‘be there’ but no longer seems to bother you much.
Similarly, you may not notice that you’ve become sleepy until you perceive
that you’re starting to yawn—and your friends may have noticed this long
before. (In my own experience, the first awareness of being tired usually
comes when I start to notice certain kinds of grammatical errors.)

Shakespeare
reminds us (in King Lear) that misery loves company: no matter how awful one’s
lot may be, we still may draw comfort from knowing that the same could happen
to someone else.

When we our betters see bearing our woes,
We scarcely think our miseries our foes.
Who alone suffers suffers most i'th' mind,
Leaving free things and happy shows behind;
But then the mind much sufferance doth o'erskip
When grief hath mates, and bearing fellowship.
How light and portable my pain seems now,
When that which makes me bend makes the King bow.

Many
other processes can alter how pain can affect our behavior:

Aaron Sloman: “Some mental states involve
dispositions, which in particular contexts would be manifested in behavior, and
if the relevant behavior does not occur then an explanation is needed (as with
a person who is in pain not wincing or showing the pain or taking steps to
reduce it). The explanation may be that he has recently joined some
stoic-based religious cult, or that he wants to impress his girl friend,
etc."—In comp.ai.philosophy, 20/7/96.

This
applies to the treatment of pain-ridden people.

“The degree of awareness of one's own pain may vary
from a near denial of its presence to an almost total preoccupation with it,
and the reasons for attending to pain may vary. Pain itself may become the
focus of the self and self-identity, or may, however uncomfortable, be viewed
as tangential to personhood. One of the most powerful influences on the way in
which symptoms are perceived and the amount of attention paid to them is the
meaning attributed to those symptoms.”[vii]

Finally, in Chapter §9, we’ll discuss the seeming
paradox implied by the common expression, “No pain, no gain.” There are many common activities, such as in
competitive sports, or training for strength, in which one tries to do things
beyond one’s reach—and where the greater the pain, then the higher the score.

When an
injured joint becomes swollen and sore, and the slightest touch causes fiery
pain, its no accident that we say it's 'inflamed.' What could be the value of
this, once the damage is already done? First, it can lead you to protect that
site; thus helping that injury to heal; then it can make you feel sick and
weak, both of which help to slow you down. So pain can promote recovery.

But
it’s hard to defend the dreadful effects of those chronic pains that never end.
Then we tend to ask questions like, “What
did I do to deserve this?" Then
if we can find to justify punishment—it may bring us relief to be able to
think, "Now I can see why it serves me right!”

Most
victims discover no such escapes, and find that much has been lost from their
lives—but some others find ways to see suffering as incentives or opportunities
to show what they can accomplish, or even as unexpected gifts to help them to
cleanse or renew their characters.

F. M. Lewis: “Becoming an invalid can be a blow to
a person's self-esteem. However, for some patients, the sick role is seen as
an elevation in status—deserving the nurturance and concern of others. The
ability to assign meaning to an illness or to symptoms has been found to
enhance some patients' sense of self-mastery over a problem or crisis."[viii]

Thus
certain victims find ways to adapt to chronic intractable pains. They work out new ways to make themselves
think and rebuild their lives around those techniques. Hear Oscar Wilde
describe how he deals with his inescapable misery:

“Morality does not help me. I am one of those who
are made for exceptions, not for laws. Religion does not help me. The faith
that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at.
Reason does not help me. It tells me that the laws under which I am convicted,
and the system under which I have suffered are wrong and unjust. But, somehow,
I have got to make both of these things just and right to me. I have got to
make everything that has happened to me good for me. The plank bed, the
loathsome food, the hard ropes, the harsh orders, the dreadful dress that makes
sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence, the solitude, the shame—each and all
of these things I had to transform into a spiritual experience. There is not a
single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a
spiritualizing of the soul.”[ix]

Recent
research on pain relief has developed new techniques, first for assessing
degrees of pain and then for successfully treating it. We now have drugs that
can sometimes suppress some of pain’s cruelest effects—but many still never
find relief—either by mental or medical means. It seems fair to complain that,
in this realm, evolution has not done well for us—and this frustrates
theologians: How to justify a world in which people are made to suffer so
much?What functions could such suffering serve? How did we
come to evolve a design
that protects our bodies but ruins our minds?

One
answer is that the bad effects of chronic pain did not evolve from selection at
all, but arose as a sort of 'programming bug.’ Perhaps our ancestral ways to
react to pain simply are not yet compatible with the reflective thoughts and
farsighted plans that more recently evolved in our brains. The cascades that
we call ‘suffering’ must have evolved from earlier schemes that helped us to
limit our injuries—by making the goal of escaping from pain take such a high
priority. The resulting disruption of other thought, was only was a small
inconvenience before we developed our greater, modern intellects. Evolution never
had any sense of what a species might evolve next—so it never prepared for
intelligence.

I cannot weep, for all my body's moisture
Scarce serves to quench my furnace-burning heart;
Nor can my tongue unload my heart's great burden,
For self-same wind that I should speak withal
Is kindling coals that fires all my breast,
And burns me up with flames that tears would quench.
To weep is to make less the depth of grief.
Tears then for babes; blows and revenge for me!
Richard, I bear thy name; I'll venge thy death,
Or die renowned by attempting it.—Henry the Sixth, Part III

When
you suffer the loss of a long-time friend, it feels like losing a part of
yourself, because grief involves our reactions to the loss of some of our mental
resources. For, certain parts of your intellect must have over time become
specialized for sharing ideas with the person you love; but now, the signals
those brain-parts transmit will never again receive any replies—just as would
happen with losing a limb. This could be why it takes so long to put to rest
the loss of a friend.

Nell
can’t comply with Gloucester’s advice because the links of
affection are too broadly dispersed for any resource to erase all at once; they
aren’t all stored in some single place. Besides, we may not want to forget them all,
as Aristotle remarks in Rhetoric:

“Indeed,
it is always the first sign of love, that besides enjoying someone's presence,
we remember him when he is gone, and feel pain as well as pleasure, because he
is there no longer. Similarly there is an element of pleasure even in mourning
and lamentation for the departed. There is grief, indeed, at his loss, but
pleasure in remembering him and, as it were, seeing him before us in his deeds
and in his life.”

So
Constance can say, in the play King John, that mournful feelings mix with pleasant memories:

Grief
fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then have I reason to be fond of grief.

Thus Shakespeare shows how
people clutch their griefs, and squeeze them till they change to joyful shapes.

As
an example, apply the 5 stages to a traumatic event most all of us have
experienced: The Dead Battery! You're going to be late to work so you rush out
to your car, place the key in the ignition and turn it on. You hear nothing but
a grind; the battery is dead.

Denial --- What's the first thing you do? You try to
start it again! And again. You may check to make sure the radio, heater, lights,
etc. are off and then..., try again.

Anger --- "I should have junked this damned car a
long time ago.”

Bargaining --- (realizing that you're going to be late for
work)... "Oh please car, if you will just start one more time I promise
I'll buy you a brand new battery, get a tune up, new tires, belts and hoses,
and keep you in perfect working condition.

Depression --- "Oh God, what am I going to do. I'm going
to be late for work. I give up. My job is at risk and I don't really care any
more. What's the use"?

Acceptance --- "Ok. It's dead. Guess I had better call
the Auto Club or find another way to work. Time to get on with my day; I'll
deal with this later."

This relates to the general
view of this book: although it is widely believed that ‘emotional’ thinking is
basically different from regular thought (and I don’t insist they are quite the
same), many of those supposed differences may disappear when we look more
closely at commonsense things—as we shall in Chapter §6.

"Don't
pay any attention to the critics. Don't even ignore them."—Sam Goldwyn

It
would be wonderful never to make a mistake, nor ever to have a wrong idea. But
perfection will always remain out of reach; we’ll always makes errors and
oversights.

Joan’s sore knee has been getting worse. Today it
hurts her all the time, even when it isn’t touched. She thinks, “ I shouldn't
have turned while I lifted that box. And I should have put ice on my knee at
once.”

We like to think in positive
terms: "An Expert is someone who
knows what to do." And you know
how to do most things so well that you scarcely need to think at all; you
recognize most of the things you see, and converse without wondering how to
speak. However, expertise also has an opposite side: "An Expert is one
who rarely fails–because of knowing what not to do.”Thus we usually do not walk into walls. We rarely stick
things in our eyes. We never tell strangers how ugly they are.

How much of a person’s
competence is based on knowing which actions not to take—that is having ways to avoid mistakes? We
don't know much about such "negative expertise” because this was rarely
discussed in Psychology, except in the writings of Sigmund Freud.

Perhaps that neglect was
inevitable because we cannot observe, from outside, the things that people do
not do. But it is almost as hard to study such things by observing from inside the mind, for example, what keeps you from having
absurd ideas. To account for this, we’ll conjecture that our minds accumulate
resources that we shalll call Critics—each of
which learns to recognize a certain particular kind of mistake. Here are a few of those types of
Critics; we’ll list more of them in Chapter §7.

A Corrector Critic warns you that you have started
to do something dangerous. "You must stop right now, because you’re
moving your hand toward a flame.” But such a warning may come too late.

A Suppressor can warn you of a danger you face, and can veto an action that’s being
considered, to stop you from acting before it's too late—for example, by
telling you, “No, do not move in that direction! Or it
could tell you to use a debugging technique.

A Censor works early
enough to keep you from having that dangerous thought—so it never even occurs
to you to put your finger into that flame. A Censor can work so
effectively that you don’t even know that it’s working for you.

A Self-Controller
recognizes
that you have been failing to carry out a plan because, you
instead of staying with it, you have kept on “changing your mind” about it.

Suppressors
are safer than Correctors are, but both of them tend to slow you down, while
you think of something else to do. However, Censors waste no time at all,
because they deflect you from
risky alternatives without
interrupting your other thoughts, and therefore can actually
speed you up. This could
be one reason why some experts can do things so quickly: they don’t even
think of the wrong things to do.

Student: How could a censor ward off a bad
thought—unless it already knows what you’re likely to think? Isn’t there some
sort of paradox there?

AI Programmer: No problem. Just design each Censor
to be a learning machine that records which decisions have led to mistakes.
Then when it next sees a similar choice, it just steers your thoughts in the
other direction, so that you won't make the same decision.

Student: Then wouldn't that Censor still take some
time to have enough effect on your mind? Besides, what if both choices
were equally bad? Then that Censor must work even earlier, to keep you from
getting into that bad situation in the first place.

AI Programmer: We could do that by giving each
Censor enough memory to record several of the previous steps that led to such
situation.

Student: Might not that cure be worse than its
disease? If your Correctors could save you from every mistake, this might make
you so conservative that you'd scarcely ever get new ideas.

Indeed,
some experts have learned so many ways for any project to go wrong that, now,
they find it hard to explore any new ideas at all.

I
have of late-- but wherefore I know not-- lost all my mirth, forgone all custom
of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition, that this
goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent
canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical
roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and
pestilent congregation of vapors.
–Hamlet II.ii.292

What happens if too many Critics switch on (or
off)? Here is a first-hand description of this:

Kay
Redfield Jamison: "The clinical reality of manic-depressive illness is
far more lethal and infinitely more complex than the current psychiatric
nomenclature, bipolar disorder, would suggest. Cycles of fluctuating moods and
energy levels serve as a background to constantly changing thoughts, behaviors,
and feelings. The illness encompasses the extremes of human experience.
Thinking can range from florid psychosis, or "madness," to patterns
of unusually clear, fast and creative associations, to retardation so profound
that no meaningful mental activity can occur. Behavior can be frenzied,
expansive, bizarre, and seductive, or it can be seclusive, sluggish, and
dangerously suicidal. Moods may swing erratically between euphoria and despair
or irritability and desperation. … [But] the highs associated with mania are
generally only pleasant and productive during the earlier, milder stages.”[xi]

In a later paper, this author
says more about such massive mental cascades:

It
seems, then, that both the quantity and quality of thoughts build during
hypomania. This speed increase may range from a very mild quickening to
complete psychotic incoherence. It is not yet clear what causes this
qualitative change in mental processing. Nevertheless, this altered cognitive
state may well facilitate the formation of unique ideas and associations. …
Where depression questions, ruminates and hesitates, mania answers with vigor
and certainty. The constant transitions in and out of constricted and then
expansive thoughts, subdued and then violent responses, grim and then ebullient
moods, withdrawn and then outgoing stances, cold and then fiery states—and the
rapidity and fluidity of moves through such contrasting experiences—can be
painful and confusing.[xii]

It is easy to recognize such
extremes in the mental illnesses called ‘bipolar’ disorders, but Chapter §7
will conjecture that we also use such processes in the course of everyday
commonsense thinking. Thus, you might use a procedure like this whever you
face a new problem:

First,
shut most of your Critics off. This helps you to think of some things you
could do—without concern about how well they might work—as though you were in a
brief ‘manic’ state.

Then, you could turn many Critics on, to examine these options more
skeptically—as though you were having a mild depression.

Finally,
choose one approach that seems promising, and then proceed to pursue it, until
one of your Critics starts to complain that you have stopped making progress.

Sometimes you may go though
such phases deliberately. However, my conjecture is that we frequently do this
on time-scales so brief that we have no sense that it’s happening.

"Never
interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” Napoleon Bonaparte

Many things we regard as
positive (such as beauty, humor, and pleasure itself) may be partly based on
censorship—hence, to that extent, could be considered negative. Thus pleasure
can seem 'positive' to the processes that now are presently “in control’—no
matter that other processes (whose expressions are currently being suppressed)
might otherwise see this as ‘negative.' (See §9-2 of SoM.) For, "I’m
enjoying this” could mean, both at
once, “I want to stay in my present state,” and “I want to prevent any changes in it."

Student:
But I thought that it was widely believed
that learning works by 'reinforcing' connections that have led to success, and
by weakening those that contribute to failure. Many educators say that we should always make
it pleasant to learn, because pleasure
is our reward for success—whereas failure deters and discourages us.

That popular view is mainly based on
research (mostly done with pigeons and rats) that also shows that quicker
rewards make learning more rapid. This has many teachers toward the idea that learning should be a
pleasant experience. However, we should not be too quick to apply this idea to beings like us, who also can learn by
reflecting on the things they have done!

I’m not saying that ‘reinforcement
theory’ is wrong—but that, for humans, it’s just part of the story; in §8-5
I’ll argue that what we can learn from how we have failed could be more
important than ‘reinforcement’ can be—at least, for our highest levels of
thinking.[xiii] For, while pleasure may help us learn easy things, section §9-4 will argue that we may need to endure some suffering to make larger-scale
changes in how we think. If so, as an ancient Stoic might say,
rewarding success can lead you to celebrate more than to investigate. Here are a few other reasons why to ‘learn from success’ is not always wise—especially when
that success was expected.

Reinforcement
can lead to Rigidity. If a
system already works, additional ‘reinforcement’ could make some its internal
connections become stronger than they need to be, which could make it harder
for that system to adapt to later new situations.

Dependency
leads to Side Effects. If a
certain resource R has worked so well that other resources have come to depend
on it, then any change you make in R will now be more likely to damage those
others. In other words, as the saying goes “Don’t fix it, unless it is
broken.[xiv]

Negative
Expertise. One way to avoid
such side effects is to leave an established resource unchanged, but to add
Critics and Censors to intervene in conditions where it has failed to work. In
other words, treat them as exceptions to rules.

Radical
Learning: You can ‘tune up” a
skill by many small steps, but eventually no more small changes will help,
because you have reached a local peak.[xv] Then further
improvement may require you to endure some discomfort and disappointment. See
§9-4.

Papert’s
Principle: When two or more
of your methods conflict, then instead of seeking a compromise, abandon the lot
and then try something else. Many steps in mental growth are less based on
acquiring new skills, but more on learning better ways to choose which older
ones to use. [See §10-4 of SoM.]

For all of those reasons, we need to
learn, not only methods that worked in the past, but also which methods have
failed—and why—so that one can avoid the
most common mistakes.

Student:
Yes, but why can’t we do that by breaking connections—so that once you’ve made
a bad mistake, your brain won’t ever do it again?

One reason why this is a bad idea is
that you’ll lose the opportunity to understand just what went wrong (so that
you can later avoid related mistakes). A second problem with this tactic is
that whenever you change some of a system's connections, this may also affect
some other behaviors that are partly based on those same connections. If you
don’t know quite how that system works, then you’re in danger of making it worse
by ‘correcting’ any remaining mistakes.

Programmer:
I know exactly what you mean. Every attempt to improve a program is likely to
introduce new bugs. That's why new programs so often contain very big sections
of ancient code: no one remembers quite how they work, and hence they’re afraid
to change them.

Student:
But what if you have no alternative, because something is wrong that you need
to fix.

Perhaps our most important ways to
improve ourselves come from learning to think about thinking itself—that is,
to 'reflect' on what our minds have been doing. However, to do this one must first learn to enjoy the
distress that results when one’s forced to inspect oneself. See §8-5 and §9-4.

Creativity: Why do some people get more good ideas? I did not
specify ‘new’ ideas—because it is easy to build a machine that spouts endless
streams of things that have never been seen; what distinguishes thinkers that
we call 'creative' is not how many new things they produce, but how useful are
the few they produce. This means that those artists have ways to suppress—or
not even generate—products that have too much novelty, leaving only the ones
that are just different enough to be useful.

Humor: Humor is also usually seen as positive but, really,
jokes are basically negative—in the sense they almost always are about things
that a person should not do, because they are prohibited, disgusting, or just
plain stupid.[xvi]

Decisiveness: Similarly, we tend to think of decision-making as
positive. But those moments in which we make a choice (and which we describe
as an ‘act of free will’) may in fact be exactly the opposite; that moment in
which ‘you make your decision’ may simply be the moment at which you turned off
the complex processes that you use for comparing alternatives.

Pleasure:If
we look at a mind as a playground in which many methods compete then the more
pleasure we feel (in the Single-Self sense), the more negative may be its total
effect on the rest of one’s mental processes! For, what actually
happened may have been that some particular process seized control, and then
turned off a lot of the rest of your mind. This, as every addict knows, makes
it hard to wish for anything else. We’ll say more about this in Chapter §9.

There are other ways to
disable resources than attempting directly to suppress them. One way to
suppress a resource is to activate one of its competitors. For example, you
can hold off sleep by arranging to get into a fight. Another trick is to repeat
a stimulus until your opponent no longer responds to it—as in the old tale of
“The Boy who Cried Wolf.”

Parenting: Consider how much a person must do in the course of
raising a child. You must feed it and clean it and work to protect it—to guard
it and clothe it and teach it and help it; for years, you must sacrifice wealth
and attention. What kind of incentive could make one forego so many other
enjoyments and goals, to become so selfless and other-directed? Such strong
constraints, if imposed from outside, would seem cruel and unusual punishment.
Clearly natural selection favored those who evolved ways to suppress those
mental Critics; no person obsessed with those handicaps could bear to endure
such prolonged distress—and would end up with fewer descendants.

Beauty: We tend to see Beauty as positive. But when someone
says something is “beautiful” and you ask, "What makes you attracted to
that," your respondent may act
as though under attack, or explain that 'there's no accounting for taste', or childishly say, “I just like it.” Such answers suggest (as we saw in §1-1) that their
liking comes partly from critic suppression. We all know that if one but
tries, one can always uncover some blemish or flaw.

Mystical Experience: If you could turn most of your critics off, you then
would have fewer concerns or goals. And if this occurs on a large enough
scale, then your whole world may suddenly seem to change—and everything now
seems glorious. If you'd like to experience this yourself, there are well-known
steps that you can take to induce it. [xvii] It helps to be suffering pain and stress; starvation
and cold will also assist. So will psychoactive drugs, and meditation too may
aid. Be sure to stay in some strange, quiet place—because sensory deprivation
helps. Next, set up a rhythmical drone that repeats some monotonous phrase or
tone, and soon it will lose all meaning and sense—and so will virtually
everything else! Then if you've done this successfully, you may suddenly find
yourself overwhelmed by some immensely compelling Presence—and then you may
spend the rest of your life trying and failing to find it again; I suspect that
it masquerades records or traces of early imprimers that long have been hiding,
disguised, in forgotten parts of your mind.

We have many kinds of words
for this—Ecstasy, Rapture, Euphoria, Bliss—and Mystical Experience. You
suddenly feel that you know the Truth, that nothing else is significant, and
that you need no further evidence; your mind has extinguished all its ways to
question what was ‘revealed’ to you—and when later you try to explain to your
friends, you find you can scarcely say anything else than how 'wonderful' that
experience was. But if you failed to find any flaws because you had turned all
your Critics off, then a better word would be 'wonderless.'

Luck's
a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
and train for ill and not for good.
—A. E. Housman

Few
textbooks of psychology discuss how we choose what to think about—or how we
choose what not to think about. However, this was a major concern to
Sigmund Freud, who envisioned the mind as a system in which each idea must
overcome barriers. Here is how he once envisioned a mind:

"...
a large anteroom in which the various mental excitations are crowding upon one
another, like individual beings. Adjoining this is a second, smaller apartment,
a sort of reception room, in which consciousness resides. But on the threshold
between the two there stands a personage with the office of doorkeeper, who
examines the various mental excitations, censors them, and denies them
admittance to the reception-room when he disapproves of them. You will see at
once that it does not make much difference whether the doorkeeper turns any one
impulse back at the threshold, or drives it out again once it has entered the
reception-room. That is merely a matter of the degree of his vigilance and
promptness in recognition."[xviii]

Thus
getting past that doorkeeper is
not quite enough to reach consciousness. That only leads to the reception room,
which he sometimes calls the "preconscious."

"The
excitations in the unconscious, in the antechamber, are not visible to
consciousness, which is of course in the other room, so to begin with they
remain unconscious. When they have pressed forward to the threshold and been
turned back by the doorkeeper, they are 'incapable of becoming conscious'; we
call them then repressed. But even those excitations which are allowed over the
threshold do not necessarily become conscious; they can only become so if they
succeed in attracting the eye of consciousness."

Freud
imagined the mind as obstacle course in which only ideas that get past all
those bars are awarded the title of consciousness. In one kind of block that
he calls "repudiation," an idea is deliberately condemned—and thus is
rendered powerless—although one can remember rejecting it. In another type,
which he calls "repression,"
an impulse is blocked at an earlier stage—without the thinker knowing this.
However, repressed ideas can still persist, expressing themselves in clever
disguises.

Inside Freud's three-part
model of mind, many resources are working at once—but they don't always share
the same purposes. Instead, that mind is a battleground between animal
instincts and social constraints. These are frequently incompatible, so the
rest of the mind must struggle to find acceptable ways to compromise—and that’s
often accomplished by subterfuge. One way to deal with a constraint is to
suppress the resource that imposes it. Another is to disguise or re-describe
it so that it arouses no Censors or Critics. Freud
used the term sublimation for
this; we sometimes call it 'rationalizing'.

“Love,
he believed, made a fool of a man, and his present emotion was not folly but
wisdom; wisdom sound, serene, well-directed. … She seemed to him so felicitous
a product of nature and circumstance that his invention, musing on future
combinations, was constantly catching its breath with the fear of stumbling
into some brutal compression or mutilation of her beautiful personal harmony
…”—Henry James, in The American.

In §1-2 we described some
ways that a person's state of mind might change:

"Sometimes
a person gets into a state where everything seems to be cheerful and
bright—although nothing outside has actually changed. Other times everything
pleases you less: the rest of the world seems dreary and dark, and your friends
complain that you seem depressed."

If you could switch all your Critics
off, then nothing would seem to
have any faults. You'd be left with few worries, concerns, or goals—and others
might describe you as elated, euphoric, demented or manic.

However, if you turned too
many Criticson, you'd see imperfections everywhere. Your entire
world would seem filled with flaws, engulfed in a flood of ugliness. If you
also found fault with your goals themselves, you'd feel no urge to straighten
things out, or to respond to any encouragement.

This means that our Criticsmust be controlled: If you turned too many on, then you’d never get
anything done. But if you turned all your critics off, it might seem as though
all your goals were achieved—and again you wouldn't accomplish much.

Nevertheless, in everyday
life there remains a wide range in which it is safe to operate. Sometimes you
feel adventurous, inclined to try new experiments. Other times you feel
conservative—and try to avoid uncertainty. And when you're in an emergency (as
when you face danger or aggression), you don’t have time to reason things out,
so you have to make quick decisions without considering most other factors.
Then you’ll have to postpone long-range plans, suspend some relationships with
your friends, expose yourself to stress and pain, and make other choices you’ll
later regret. To do this, you'll have to suppress your suppressors—and then you
may seem like a quite different person.

We use terms like
'disposition' and 'mood' to describe someone's overall state of mind. But
terms like these are hard to define, because a person’s present state involves
so many processes. Some of these change the ways we perceive, while others
affect which goals we'll select, which strategies we’ll choose to use, and what
degrees of detail we’ll focus on. Yet other processes turn our thoughts from
one mental realm to another, so that first one may think about physical things,
then about some social concern, and then about some longer-term plan.

What determines the spans of
time that our minds spend in each dispositional state? Those intervals span an
enormous range. A flash of anger, or fear, or a sexual image may last for only
a very brief moment. Other moods may last minutes or hours—and some
dispositions persist for weeks or years. "John is angry" means that
he's angry now—but "an angry kind of person" may describe a lifelong
trait. The durations of such mental states could depend on how we regulate the
rates at which we switch.

In §7-2 we’ll speculate about
how our Criticsmight be arranged. To what extent are they
independent—like demons that constantly survey the scene, waiting for moments
to intervene? To what extent are they controlled by special, more centralized
managers? How do we learn new censors and critics? How many critics have
critics themselves to scold them for poor performances? Are certain minds more
productive because their critics are better organized?

Now it is more than a century
since Sigmund Freud raised questions like these—but they have been so widely
ignored that we still have don’t have adequate answers to them. Perhaps this
situation will change as we get better ways to see inside brains.

Whatever you may be trying to
do, your brain may have other plans for you.

I was trying to work on a technical theory, but
was starting to fall asleep. Then I found myself imagining that my rival Professor
Challenger was about to develop the same technique. This caused a flicker of
angry frustration, which blocked for the moment that urge to sleep—and enabled
me to proceed with my work.

In fact, Challenger was not
doing any such thing; he works in a totally different field. But although he
was a close friend of mine, we had recently had an argument. So he served as
an opportune candidate when I needed someone to be angry at. Let's make up a
theory of how this worked.[xix]

A
resource called Work was attending
to one of my principal goals.
Another one called Sleep
tried to seize control—but then that fantasy appeared.
This aroused a mixture of Anger,
annoyance, frustration, and fear.
Somehow, these then had the effect of disrupting the process of falling asleep.

This sequence of steps
established a state that counteracted the urge to sleep—and thus returned my
mind to its 'working' state. We can see my use of that fantasy as having the
effect of an emotional 'double negative': by using one system to switch off
another.

Everyone uses such tricks to
combat frustration, tedium, pain, or sleep. Here I used anger to keep myself
working—but the same technique might serve as well, if one were falling behind
in a race, or trying to lift too heavy a weight. By self-inducing anger or
shame, you sometimes can counteract weakness or pain.

Note that ‘Self-control’
tactics need careful direction. Just a brief tweak might serve to stop Sleep
--so slight that you don’t know
you’re doing it. But if you don't sufficiently anger yourself, you might
relapse into lassitude—whereas if you get yourself too incensed, you’ll
completely forget what you wanted to do.

Here’s another example where
part of a mind 'exploits' one emotion for the purpose to turning off
another—thus helping you to attain some goal that you cannot achieve more
directly.

Celia is trying to follow a diet. When she sees
that thick, rich chocolate cake, she is filled with a strong temptation to eat.
But when she imagines her friend, Miss Perfect-Body, looking gorgeous in her
new bathing suit—then Celia’s passion to have that same shape keeps her from
actually eating the cake.

What is the role of that
fantasy? Celia's procedure for ‘dieting' does not include any straightforward
way to suppress her reckless appetite. However, the emotion that we call Disgust
is already designed to do just
that (by backing-up one's digestive tract) and, somehow, Celia has trained
herself to react in that way when she thinks of her shape. When the sight of
her rival arouses that image, she'll have less desire to eat that cake. But
that strategy is not without risk: if Celia's jealousy makes her depressed, she
might engorge the entire cake.

Why should fantasies have
such effects, when we 'know' that they aren’t real? Surely, this must be
partly because each mind-part sees only a few other parts, which serve as its
private reality. We never directly see the world; that’s just another
Single-Self myth. Instead, although some parts of your brain directly react to
what your external senses provide, most of them must base their representations
on information that they receive from other, internal brain-resources.

For example, when you sit at
a table across from a friend and assume that she still has a back and some
legs, you're using old models and memories. It's the same for the chair that
she's sitting on. None of those things now lie in your sight, yet it’s almost
as though you can see them. Fantasy is the missing link. In {Imagination} and
in {Simuli}, we'll see how machines could imagine such things.

Student:
I know that we all have fantasies, but why did such strange ways of thinking
evolve? Why can’t we just figure out what to do in a perfectly rational way?

My answer is simply that
there's no such thing; that popular concept of ‘rational’ is itself just one
more fantasy—that our thinking is ever wholly based on pure, detached logical
reasoning. It might seem somewhat ‘irrational’ to exploit an emotion to solve
a problem. Our culture teaches us to believe that thoughts and emotions are
separate things. But this makes no sense from the viewpoint of Work: when it
can’t control a resource that it needs, this will appear from Work’s point of view to be just an additional obstacle. So far as your agents for Work are concerned, exploiting Anger to turn off Sleep is like using a stick to extend one’s reach. No
matter that when this is seen from outside, it appears to be "emotional”:
to Work this need not seem
anything than another way to achieve its goal. We're always exploiting
fantasies in the course of our everyday reasoning, and we all use such tricks
for 'self-control'”

To
stay awake, you can measure out the right amount of some stimulant. You can
pinch yourself to produce some pain; or adopt an uncomfortable posture, or take
a deep breath, or just set your jaw. You can move to a more exciting place,
or indulge in a strenuous exercise. Or, you can make yourself angry or
afraid—by imagining that you have failed.

A major part of our daily
lives consists of these kinds of activities. It's customary to assume that
it’s ‘you’ who is choosing to do them. But often they come from small parts of
your mind that are trying to change their environments. We need to imagine fictional things whenever we solve a
geometry problem, or look forward to a forthcoming vacation. Whenever we
think, we use fantasies to envision what we don't yet have, but might need. To
think about changing the way things are, we have to imagine how they might be.

Student:
Again, I agree that we do such things—but again, I cannot help wondering why.
Why cannot Work just turn
off Sleep,
but must use such indirect
methods? Why do we have to tell lies to ourselves, by inventing illusions and
fantasies—instead of simply commanding our minds to do whatever we want them to
do? Why doesn’t Work have
better connections?

One answer seems clear:
Directness would be too dangerous. If Work could simply turn Hunger off, we’d
all be in peril of starving to death. If Work could directly switch Anger on,
we might find ourselves fighting most of the time. If Work could simply
extinguish Sleep, we'd be likely to wear our bodies out. This is why it's
distressing to hold your breath, and why it's so hard not to fall asleep—or to
take control over how much you eat. Few animals that could do such things
would live to have any descendants. Consequently, our brains evolved ways to
keep our minds from meddling with the systems that work to keep us alive.
Hence, we can interfere with those processes, only by becoming devious. We
can’t simply suppress the urge to sleep—but eventually, we discover some tricks
that can do this by using indirect methods.

For example, here Work has no
direct way to stop Sleep, but has learned that Anger undermines Sleep. And
while Work has no direct way to activate Anger, it has learned that a certain
fantasy can arouse Anger. So if Work can somehow activate that fantasy, then
Anger will start to inhibit Sleep, and Work will be able to get back to work.

Student:
Your theory suggests more questions than it answers. How could Work
manage to learn such a trick? How are those fantasies produced? How are
those memories retrieved? How can a fantasy make you angry? How does Work induce that fantasy? How does
Anger inhibit Sleep? And why do we need to sleep at all? Considering how much
time it wastes, and all the inconvenience it brings, why did we ever evolve
such a thing?

§5-8 Simuli will talk about how machines could make fantasies, §6-2.2 Remembering will consider how memories might be retrieved, and §9-2.1 Self-Control will discuss how Work might learn to use such a trick.
As for why we need to sleep at all, it is strange how little we know about
this. Recent research suggests that it plays important roles in how we learn,
but clearly, sleep serves other purposes. It is common in evolution that
whenever some new kind of function appears, other systems evolve new ways to
exploit it. Thus once a first form of sleep evolved, other functions were
found for it—perhaps for renewing depleted resources, for repairing damage to
organs, or, perhaps for imagining things without exposure to external risk.
So, we should not expect to find one reason for all the many aspects of
sleep—or for any other mental function.

Student:
How does Anger inhibit Sleep in the first place?

That must involve ancient
machinery. We're born with great systems of built-in connections that help us
recognize dangers, failures and other sorts of emergencies. These 'alarms'
have connections to other resources, such as the “Emotion-Arousers” of §1-6,
which can drive into those great cascades—like anger, anxiety, fear, or
pain—that can reset all our priorities. [See §§Alarms.]

Student:
You haven't discussed how Anger works.

One theory could be that the
state we call ‘Anger’ suppresses
some of our more thoughtful resources—so that we become less 'reasonable'.
Then we tend to make more quick decisions, and thus are disposed to take more
risks. It is tempting to think of such a person as erratic and unpredictable.
Yet paradoxically such persons become, in certain ways, more predictable than they’d normally be—and that can have
a useful effect: when you are angry and express a threat, your opponent may
sense that you won’t change your mind—because you are no longer ‘reasonable.’
The effectiveness of apparent threats depends on convincing antagonists that
one truly intends to carry them out. If you can make yourself think that your
threat is real, this can help you to display the emotional signs that will make
your opponent believe it, too!

Critic:
Not all types of anger cause rapid decisions. When Charles flies into a sudden
rage, and punches someone who taunted him, his decision is quick—and he takes a
big risk. But when Joan is chronically angry about the destruction of
rainforest habitats, she may become deliberate and methodical at raising funds
for saving them.

Our adult emotions continue
to grow into ever more convoluted arrangements. As we age, we can train our
emotional states—and modify their outward signs—till they no longer resemble
their infantile shapes.

Physiologist:
Anger is not just a state of mind; it also raises your muscle tone, fires you
up with energy, and speeds up your reaction time. This involves the body and
not just the brain.

Certainly, Anger engages many bodily functions; it can affect your
heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, and sweating. However, when seen in the
Cloud–of–Resources view, there is nothing special about such connections; the
body itself then appears as just one more set of resources to exploit. (And
quite a few of those same effects will occur if you simply hold your breath.)
For, it is easy to see why such systems evolved: anger helps us to prepare for
certain and emergencies—such as fighting, defense, and intimidation. However,
we should not too closely identify these with how Anger changes one’s Ways
to Think; it is true that these
interact with those somatic effects, but yet are far from being the same sorts
of things. [See §§Embodiment.]

[iv] For example, see www.umass.edu/preferen/mpapers/SingerEmpathy.pdf

[v]in “Why you can’t build a machine that feels pain,” Brainstorms, Bradford Books, 1978. This
is an ironic title for the deeper idea that 'pain' is a suitcase word that
comprises so many ideas and processes that it does not make much technical
sense to speak of it as definite kind of entity.